Theories of Development and The Ego
Erikson's greatest innovation was to postulate not five stages of development, as Sigmund Freud had done with his psychosexual stages, but eight. He then later added a ninth stage in his book "The Life Cycle Completed". Erik Erikson believed that every human being goes through a certain number of stages to reach his or her full development, theorizing eight stages that a human being goes through from birth to death. Erikson elaborated Freud's genital stage into adolescence, and added three stages of adulthood. His widow Joan Serson Erikson elaborated on his model before her death, adding a ninth stage (old age), taking into consideration the increasing life expectancy in Western cultures. Erikson is also credited with being one of the originators of Ego psychology, which stressed the role of the ego as being more than a servant of the id. According to Erikson, the environment in which a child lived was crucial to providing growth, adjustment, a source of self-awareness and identity. Erikson won a Pulitzer Prize and a U.S. National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion for Gandhi's Truth (1969), which focused more on his theory as applied to later phases in the life cycle.
Read more about this topic: Erik Erikson
Famous quotes containing the words theories of, theories, development and/or ego:
“Theories of child development and guidelines for parents are not cast in stone. They are constantly changing and adapting to new information and new pressures. There is no “right” way, just as there are no magic incantations that will always painlessly resolve a child’s problems.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Generalisation is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women’s broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“The ego is not master in its own house.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)